Starting with a book collection of about 3,500 titles, the library grew steadily and numbered 75,000 books in 1913 and 130,000 in 1945, specializing in art, music, literature and modern fiction in various European languages. In 1928-29 the library was incorporated into the Frankfurt University Library. Under the National Socialist regime the library was renamed ‘The Library for Modern Languages and Music’ and every effort was made to erase the name of the philanthropist Rothschild family. The extensive collection was preserved, however, and still serves today as an indispensable academic resource.

The collection also includes newspaper articles about the Rothschild family and their business. Over 20,000 press-clippings from 1886-1916, bound in 31 large volumes, are a unique resource on the family’s history. These clippings have been digitized and processed with optical character recognition and are accessible at the Rothschild collection online

A Virtual Tour of Jewish Frankfurt
This online exhibition was produced by Frankfurt University Library in cooperation with the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, associate partner of Judaica Europeana. It will be disseminated jointly with the Tourist Office of the City of Frankfurt.

Frankfurt has been a home to an important Jewish community which contributed greatly to the city’s development. The history of the community is embedded in the city’s architectural heritage. This exhibition takes the visitor to many sites of Jewish life today as well as historic buildings and monuments.

Jewish Britain: A History in 50 Objects showcases highlights from the collections of the Jewish Museum in London. Each object tells a story about the history of the Jewish community in Britain from medieval to modern times. The themes include: working lives and trades, family life and home, growing up, military service, religious life and politics.

Yiddish Theatre in London is a virtual exhibition hosted on Europeana showing a unique collection of photographs, documents and objects held at the Jewish Museum London. The exhibition explores the rich theatre form brought by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century which resulted in the heyday of Yiddish theatres in London in the early 20th century.

All About Jewish Theatre. From Sholem Aleichem and Chagall to the Fiddler on the Roof: A short glossary of historical events, characters, and actors.

The Star of David and the Tricolore: a crowd-sourcing initiativeStella di David e Tricolore was developed by MiBAC/ICCU by inviting users to provide archival material, publications, stories, videos and photographs relating to the history of the Jews in Italy in the 150 years since Italian unification.

Images of Greek Jews is a virtual exhibition from the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens. It is a small selection of 20th century photographs from the Museum’s extensive photographic archive currently being digitized in the framework of the Judaica Europeana project. Family portraits, school children, scouts and others groups from Athens, Chania, Corfu, Ioannina, Thessaloniki and Volos before and after World War I and II, capture Greek Jews at formal occasions, school trips or simply at leisure. They convey a sense of a flourishing and well integrated community.

150 Years of Achievement in Education A virtual exhibition from a Judaica Europeana partner in Paris celebrates 150 years since the establishment of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an educational institution which created a vast network of schools in Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey, Ottoman Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Syria and other countries. Hundreds of thousands of children have benefited from a broad-minded education provided in the French language and informed by the Jewish tradition. The Alliance helped enrich culturally the lives of generations of men and women while providing them with social and economic opportunities in wider society. Today, the Alliance does its work mainly in France, the United States, Morocco and Israel. It takes an active role in promoting Jewish culture across the world.

Jewish postcards: Networking in Europe. This exhibition presents a selection of the Hungarian Jewish Archive historic collection of postcards from East-Central Europe and the main destinations of Jewish migration. The postcards were the first popular media representations of Jews and Jewish life as they were seen.

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Online Showcase: Postcards from the Past
A culture of holiday greetings developed in Germany between 1890 and 1910. Hundreds of paintings and illustrations of Jewish life were reproduced as postcards which were then traded, collected and sent off to family and friends. Holiday cards are often sentimental, then and now.

Matters of Faith
Faith comes in all shapes and sizes. It casts a spell on things, customs and places. The nine animated movies presented in this picture portray "matters of faith" in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Short History of Jewish Football
The Jewish Museum Berlin is celebrating the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa with a brief history of Jewish football (USA: soccer).

What we won’t show you ...
The objects a museum displays are significant. But what museums won’t show you can be equally revealing. In these film clips, staff of the Jewish Museum Berlin talk about what you won’t see, thereby shedding light on German-Jewish life, on collecting, restoring, presenting as well as on ethical questions and political debates.

Jewish Music Institute
SOAS, University of LondonWhat is Jewish Music? History and Styles
The study of Jewish music encompasses many genres of religious, semi-religious and folk music played in the Synagogue and in the Jewish home and also art music using Jewish texts or themes. The study of Jewish music combines distinctively the essential elements of musicology, ethnomusicology and interculturalism.

Exploring 20th Century LondonJewish London
London's Jewish population was first established in the Middle Ages, but Jewish people were expelled from England in the 13th century and not allowed to return until 1656. A small Jewish community re-established itself in the City, and grew gradually larger throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Jews worked in a wide range of professions, from banking to dealing in old clothes. Jewish Festivals• Jewish Food• Jews and the Rag Trade• Jews of the West End

Moving Here
Moving Here explores and illustrates why people came to England over the last 200 years and what their experiences were and continue to be. Led by the National Archives, it is a consortium of 30 institutions.

Centre of Jewish Studies University of ManchesterManchester and Zionism: the Community, the University and the State of Israel
This online exhibition represents the beginning of an on-going project to outline the development of Zionism in Manchester. The narrative comprises a sequentially arranged set of panels, with links to related topics and primary source material including photos, documents and letters. Index

The Medici Archive ProjectJewish History: Jewish Heritage in the Medici Granducal Archives
Located in the very center of town, the Florentine Ghetto at the end of the sixteenth century was emerging as one of Florence’s busiest commercial centers, along with the shops in the nearby Ponte Vecchio, the Mercato Vecchio, and the Mercato Nuovo. A crossroads for scholars of Jewish backgrounds, doctors, (al)chemists, as well as merchants, Florence, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as a whole, became a haven for Southern European Jewry.

Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) was one of the preeminent French Impressionists. This exhibition examines the social ideologies and aesthetic theories that concerned Pissarro during his long career, through themes such as work and leisure, retreat from city life, and transitions in time and place.
Online feature

Sanctuary and Synagogue: the experience of the Portuguese and the Ashkenazi Jews in Amsterdam
The seventeenth century ushered in the Golden Age of the Netherlands as Amsterdam became the leading European center for international trade and commerce. In this milieu, the Portuguese Jews flourished financially as a result of their extensive mercantile connections. German Jews began to settle in Amsterdam shortly after the establishment of the Portuguese Jewish community. With limited financial resources they were heavily dependent upon the charitable support of the wealthier Portuguese Jews.

Remembrance and Renewal: Chamber Music by German Jewish ComposersThe chamber music of Remembrance and Renewal's featured composers reflected the complex and changing identities of German Jews, with their increasing orientation toward Western culture and the art music of the time, particularly German literature, culture, and nationalism.

From this world to the next: Jewish approaches to illness, death and the afterlife
Much of what we perceive as Jewish experience is bound up in what is collectively referred to as "life cycle events". Birth, circumcision, bar/bat mitzvah and marriage are eagerly anticipated events associated with great joy and happiness. The end of that road is the inevitable encounter of the human being with death. Death, of course, is the final "life cycle event".

Past Perfect – the Jewish experience in early 20th century illustrated by postcards
Originally known as a "postal card", the postcard was created in 1869. This innovation, which afforded the opportunity to send mail inexpensively, rapidly became the most common and reliable method for communicating brief personal messages. Initially both sides of the card remained blank: the front contained the message, while the back was used for the address. In 1889 private publishers in Germany began issuing postcards with attractive pictures printed on the front side.

Center for Jewish History
The Center for Jewish History (CJH) is home to five preeminent Jewish institutions dedicated to history, culture and art: American Jewish Historical Society, American Sephardi Federation, Leo Baeck Institute, Yeshiva University Museum, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Many of the virtual exhibitions detailed below under the header of one of these institutions has been produced in partnership with the Center for Jewish History.
CJH online exhibitions

JDC Archives, New York
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives houses one of the most significant collections in the world for the study of modern Jewish history. Comprising the organizational records of JDC, the overseas rescue, relief, and rehabilitation arm of the American Jewish community, the archives includes over 3 miles of text documents, 100,000 photographs, a research library of more than 6,000 books, 1,100 audio recordings including oral histories, and a video collection with records of activity, in over 90 countries dating from 1914 to the present.

A Joint Effort: JDC's Beginnings, 1914-1921 is a virtual exhibition from the Archives of The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), an associate member of Judaica Europeana. JDC is a New York-based humanitarian organization established in 1914 to assist Jews in Europe and Palestine who were impacted by the devastation of World War I. This exhibition showcases period photographs and documents depicting the “Joint’s” earliest efforts to rescue and bring relief to Jewish communities impacted by the war and its immediate aftermath..

Beyond Relief: JDC's Work in the Ukraine and Crimea between the Wars features the ground-breaking work of JDC in developing opportunities in agriculture and industry for Jews living in the Soviet Union. This virtual exhibit, created by the JDC Archives, tells the story of its early efforts to stave off famine in the Ukraine and Crimea, its growing role as an innovative developer of opportunities for Jews in these regions, and the hard conclusion to its programs at the height of the Stalinist era.

Everything Possible: JDC and the Children of the DP Camps This virtual exhibit from the JDC Archives details the difficult challenges facing Jews in the Displaced Persons camps of post-World War II Europe, and the ways JDC helped them rebuild their lives: supplemental food and clothing, medical treatment, schools, training courses, religious and cultural programs, loans, mail services, family tracing, and emigration assistance. Responding to the special needs of children, JDC helped infants to adolescents survive, adapt, and even thrive in a shifting and often inhospitable environment.

In Memoriam is a virtual exhibit honoring JDC representatives who lost their lives while working to help Jews in Europe. Their stories are bound up in JDC’s narrative of a turbulent century of rescue and relief.

Printing the Talmud: from Bomberg to Schottenstein
We at Yeshiva University are pleased to be able to bring together the timeless knowledge of the Talmud with the ephemeral nature of the Internet in this online exhibit, which truly embodies the principles of Torah U'Madda – general learning and Judaic knowledge – benefiting from each other. Visitors may view the amazing manuscripts and printed books gathered for the exhibition
in a more personal way. Instead of residing behind glass, the documents are right in a viewer's home, office, or living room – able to be enlarged, examined, and read.

Alfred Dreyfus: The Fight for Justice
Organized by the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme
In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was wrongfully arrested and jailed for treason. His trial and the political scandal that ensued, left France bitterly divided for decades, with liberal intellectuals on one side, and the clergy and military on the other. This exhibition revisits the trial and its aftermath in a completely new way: through Dreyfus' personal effects.

16 mm Postcards: Home Movies of American Jewish Visitors to 1930s Poland
with the Center for Jewish History http://www.cjh.org and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research http://www.yivo.org/
This exhibition brings to life the landscape of people in Poland through the amateur movies of immigrant American Jews who traveled "back home" to visit their families, friends, and former communities in the 1920s and 1930s. These films offer a rare, intimate and - quite literally - moving picture of Jewish families, towns and society in pre-World War II Poland.

YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

Online Galleries
View samples from and read about some of YIVO’s current and recent exhibitions and explore examples of artifacts from the Archives and Photographic collections by touring the online galleries listed below. Index

The Power of Persuasion: Jewish Posters from Prewar Poland, 1900-1939
The posters in the exhibition document a time when posters were a very important means of communication. They disseminated information when other forms of mass media had not yet developed or were in their formative stages. During the interwar period, posters became a ubiquitous presence on Jewish streets. Advertisements, announcements, and calls for action, they were pasted onto walls, wooden fences, or onto the round "public announcement" kiosks which could be found on many street corners.
Text

People of a Thousand Towns
The photographs in People of a Thousand Towns constitute a visual record of thousands of pre-World War II Jewish communities in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. They span the late 19th century to the early 1940s and document the lives of large Jewish centers as well as many smaller towns and villages.

Leo Baeck Institute
The Leo Baeck Institute for the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry is a research, exhibition, and lecture center whose library and archives offer the most comprehensive documentation for the study of German Jewish history.
Photo collections• Exhibitions

Hermann Struck: Artistic Wanderer from Berlin to Haifa
Hermann Struck (1876-1944) was a successful Berlin artist renowned for his masterful portraits and landscapes. He taught the art of printmaking to some great artists, including Marc Chagall and Jacob Steinhardt. Struck was an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist who maintained an outlook on the world that was decidedly and unconventionally cosmopolitan. While serving on the Eastern front in the German Army during WW I, Struck came into contact with the Jewish communities of Galicia and Lithuania. He sketched everything he saw relating to the life of Eastern European Jewry.

Goldscheider – A World Brand from Vienna: Commerce and Art in an Age of Transformation
From its founding in Vienna in 1885 until 1938, the Goldscheider Manufactory was the leading international ceramics producer in Europe with subsidiaries in Paris, Leipzig, and Florence. Pieces are displayed that illuminate the political and social transformations taking place throughout Central Europe. Many of these developments enabled Jewish business owners like the Goldscheiders to thrive, before being reviled by the Nazis.
Exhibit

Jews, Commerce and Culture
Jewish economic history is both understudied and overrated. This paradox is not hard to explain: Jews' historically disproportionate role in commerce and finance has been a source of embarrassed silence for some scholars and eager exaggeration for others, largely depending on one's attitude to capitalism and readiness to associate it prominently with Jews.

The Jewish Book: Material Texts and Comparative Contexts
Over the last half-century, the critical study of the history of material texts in a variety of forms, from wax tablets and parchment scrolls to flat screen laptops and DVDs, has entered the academic mainstream. The Fellows at CAJS explored the Jewish book as a historical agent in Jewish culture and as a medium of exchange within the larger cultures in which Jews have lived. Designed by Seth Jerchower

Printer, Publisher, Peddler: The Business of the Jewish Book
Book production is a business as well as a craft, a trade and an art form. Since the invention of moveable type in the fifteenth century, Jews as well as non-Jews have been engaged in the printing and sale of a surprisingly diverse array of editions of Judaica. This exhibition offers a small sampling of that vast panoply of creativity. Arthur Kiron, Curator, Seth Jerchower, Site Design.

Tradition and Its Discontents: Jewish History and Culture in Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe was home to the greatest living reservoir of Jewish civilization in the world for over three centuries. From among the ranks of East European Jews emerged many of the key religious, intellectual, artistic, and political currents that shaped Jewish life across the modern period. Designed and edited by Seth Jerchower.

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Virtual Exhibitions: Resources

DEMES
DEMES is a structured metadata model for the description of digital exhibitions developed by the international Digital Exhibitions Working Group. This pioneering initiative of a standardized model offers the possibility of greatly improving the current descriptive practice for digital exhibitions. DEMES will faciliate discovery of exhibitions by search engines and the public, cataloguing of exhibitions, sharing of data and exchange of information. See DEMES booklet published by AthenaPlus and the Digital Exhibitions Working Group.

MOVIOMOVIO is a set of user-friendly tools for creating digital exhibitions online. It was developed during the AthenaPlus project. The main components of this set are:

an open source software CMS MOVIO

CMS MOVIO for mobile devices: smartphones and tablets

MOVIO APP for mobile platforms

MOVIO HUB, an online catalogue of exhibitions, available also on MOVIO APP

The tools have been tested in exhibitions produced by the partners of the AthenaPlus project. They are open-source and can be easily integrated with most digital platforms in the heritage sector. The MOVIO code can be downloaded from its website. MOVIO is also a hub for good practice.

GOOGLE OPEN GALLERYGoogle Open Gallery provides open source tools and technologies to help create, preserve, and promote access to cultural heritage. This platform of the Google Cultural Institute may also allow you to create a mobile application. It provides an easy to use tool to upload images, videos and audio for creating online exhibitions and for storytelling.

OMEKA
From the Ron Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog.

An outline for your Virtual ExhibitionVirtual Exhibitions
Presentation by Elizabeth Selby of the Jewish Museum of London at the Judaica Europeana meeting, Paris, February 2011

Digital Storytelling in Practice
In this issue of Library Technology Reports, we look at how digital storytelling has emerged from the timeless practice of traditional storytelling. We explore how digital storytelling has been used in different contexts to aid educators and how librarians can effectively implement digital storytelling programs. We also take a brief look at some of the technological tools that can be used to tell a digital story.